by Rajkumar Ramchandran
For ages the people of this world have been searching for the truth about God, who He is and how one can know Him. This is how religion evolved, with man trying to find God. There are some universal assumptions of God’s nature, that He is Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent and He is Spirit and He is Holy. Every Human being has a spirit which is imperfect and therefore the imperfect spirit cannot find a perfect God so every effort man takes to find God, which is, religion, fails.
Knowing God is by revelation. While religion is about man trying to find God the Bible talks about God finding man. The Bible is a book written over 1600 years by 40 different people each of whom was inspired by the Holy Spirit of God (2 Peter 1:20-21, 2 Tim 3:16-17) and it is flawless (Prov 30:5). The gist of the entire Bible is the Lord Jesus Christ who is God (Isaiah 9;6, John 1:1, Titus 2:13, Phil 2:6). He became man to redeem mankind from the evil one (satan) and from sin which prevented man from having a relationship with God. Man was made in God’s image ( Genesis 1:27). That is why man is three-in- one (spirit , soul and body) as God is three in one , the Father, the Son (Lord Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit.
Jesus Christ came to the world 2,000 years ago to reconcile man to God through His perfect sacrifice on the cross and reveal God to man as He Himself is incarnate God ( God become man Isaiah 9:6, John 1:1). What makes Him unique and set apart from all so-called god-men and women who claim to be divine is that He was sinless (1 John 3:5, Hebrews 4:15, 2 Cor :21). In fact everything about Him is miraculous, His birth (born of a virgin, Isaiah 7:14), His Life (sinless, 1 John 3:5), His death (He gave up His Spirit, Mathew 27:50), His Resurrection (the only one in history, Acts 2:24).
Because Jesus was sinless and telling a lie is sin (Leviticus 19:11) everything Jesus said can be trusted and believed. He said ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me ‘. (John 14:6). He came to reveal God to man (John 17:6) as He Himself is fully God (John 1:1) and fully man (Hebrews 2:14-15) as He took on a body of flesh and blood.
For ages people have been searching for the Truth . The Lord Jesus is the Truth (John 14:6). People have been searching for spiritual light. He is the Light (John 8:12). They have been crying out for deliverance from death. Jesus Christ delivered man from death and brought and gave the gift of eternal life
(1 Corinthians 15:55-57, 2 Timothy 1:10). For ages people have been searching for God. The Lord Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the ages (1 Cor 10:11). He is not a manifestation of God but the INCARNATE God (John 1:14).
The Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples that anyone who has seen Him has seen God (John 14:9). To know God is to know the Lord Jesus Christ. All the attributes of God and the fullness of the Godhead are manifest in Christ, (Colossians 2:9-10).
To even begin to know Him and receive eternal Life one has to realize he/she is a sinner, believe one’s sins have been forgiven by the Lord Jesus Christ by His perfect sacrifice on the Cross, receive Him into your heart as Saviour and Lord through prayer and decide to live for Him thereafter. At that time one receives the gift of Salvation and a veil that covers the heart to prevent understanding the scriptures is opened. The Holy Spirit will comes into your heart and begins to reveal the Holy Bible and more and more of the nature of God through the scriptures.
God never changes (Malachi 3:6). This means His likes and dislikes, therefore, never change and these are revealed in the Scriptures so it’s important that one reads the Hoy Bible not to know the Bible but to know the Lord to whom the Bible points to (John 5:39-40). When one reads the Bible with an open heart then one realizes that its easier to know God than to know human beings because human beings change but God does not.
According to 1 John 2:23 ‘no one who denies the Son has the Father, whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.‘
In conclusion to know the Lord Jesus Christ is to know who God is for He is the exact representation of God’s being (Hebrews 1:3).
RAJKUMAR RAMCHANDRAN is an itinerant preacher and evangelist who turned to Christ after studying the Bible to prove it wrong. He was a telecommunications engineer in Siemens for 16 years before launching Logos Ministries—to assist churches in the ministry of the Word. He lives in New Delhi with his wife Ragini.
